robardin

... By going to the Darkside? :/ And nobody's going to talk about Baon's massive display of Sand Mastery potential? Previously, when discussing the 17th Shard group at the Purelake that included Demoux (Seer Misting) and Galladon (Elantrian), he had been used as an example of how the 17th Shard members had some technique to worldhop and to slow aging (or to skip years in the CR) that didn't require one to be Invested. Well... I guess he is, after all! Maybe I need to re-read the whole thing more closely, but if the sabotage of the Mastrells had been due to contamination of the water bowl itself (not the water supply), how come Kenton wasn't affected, at least in his duel with Drile?

You are! Or your post is! (It stands for "Omnivorous Porcupine". Or "Original Post[er]". Your pick.)

Ah, I found the image of the broadsheet! Interesting that a text search of BoM didn't find it, even though other text from "broadsheet" entries do. It's even in the Coppermind wikia! Very interesting and entertaining. In addition to meeting Nazh and nearly getting hit by some kind of Shade, she also has a Close Encounter of the Hoid Kind. And that map of New Seran that led to some kind of hidden treasure of artifacts... Was her father involved in the Set's research into Captain Jordis' crashed airship?

i don't remember either of those tidbits, thanks! So if burning metals with Allomancy can feed Nightblood, what about a Leecher burning chromium drawing Nightblood? Added: I just text-searched my Kindle versions of Alloy of Law, Shadows of Self, and The Bands of Mourning, for any use of "chromium" and "leech", and didn't find the broadsheet bit you mentioned. Instead, I discovered that AoL has a typo, the first time Marasi chats with Wayne about her "slow time" bubble being so much less useful than Wayne's "fast time" version, both refer to her burning "chromium" instead of "cadmium", though the Ars Arcana in the back correctly states that chromium is for Leechers and cadmium is for Pulsers, and Wayne also says in that same conversation that he had had no access to bendalloy in the Roughs without Wax as "bismuth and cadmium aren't the kinds of metals you find in your corner store", it being the Allomantic alloy of cadmium for the reverse time effect. And as for the question, "What if a Leecher drew Nightblood", that has been answered in a WoB:

I once posed this objection as well, and had this WoB thrown back at me: So you get not only the speed-of-thought bit, but also the boost to making intuitive links and leaps between thoughts/ideas. It does not turn you into Ken Jennings in the sense that you would suddenly have a wealth of trivia knowledge you didn't have before - rather, the speed at which Jennings can see two separate hints in a clue and put them together, combined with what he knows, to get the solution, far more rapidly than someone else with the same information might ever do. (Note that Brandon was once roommates with Ken in college, so this "I knew all that but would never be able to piece it together in a buzzer-beating situation" is a little bit of a personal frame of reference he is putting out there!)

"In an eyeblink, I worked through all billion possible outcomes based on all possible moves from this instant on. I was rusting doomed."

If you know about ninjas, you'd know that they're not just clever folk well practiced in planning stealthy operations. They're also good at the execution part. Think of a very clever and convoluted plan to do something seemingly impossible, along the lines of, I don't know, the plot of Ocean's Eleven (a heist movie). Now concede that a zinc compounder could formulate that plan more or less instantaneously, at will (which is still not necessarily true, as the "input information" required may not be there - zinc doesn't grant nigh-infinite knowledge, only mental insight). Even so, that wouldn't be the same as actually being able to pull the heist off, especially in a small amount of time. You, the zinc compounder, are simply not physically capable of executing that plan; at best, you have worked out a good way to assemble an optimal team to go and try to do that plan. Or to use your computer system analogy, an infinitely fast clock speed on a CPU does not equate to infinite memory store, optimal algorithms or data structure use in the programming, or the right kind of data input for the desired output (if it is even possible - no amount of zinc compounding will get you to "the last digit of pi", or to get around Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem).

So, per that WoB, "a Leecher trying to clean out a Compounder would have to get a good grip and hang on for a few seconds." A few... Seconds? That seems almost OP. Also, shouldn't that only work to Leech a metalmind as it was being tapped? Otherwise a Leecher should be able to just Leech a metalmind directly, rather than touching the Feruchemist (the Feruchemist is only a conduit for the Investiture in the metalmind when tapping, or possibly while filling it). That said, "a few seconds of holding on" and a good supply of chromium should work, then, to drain Rashek's atiumminds of youth that he must constantly tap, with the same effect of killing him via Spiritual Boomerang as his body tries to finally snap back to its proper age. Therein lies the trick: getting both Vin and Kelsier, the chromium burners, in a position to maintain constant physical contact with Rashek, who would certainly sense what was going on, and be highly incentivized to escape. How about an "Allomantic grenade"? If they can bring that from Era 2 and Leech him from a distance the way Irich did to Wax on the train in The Bands of Mourning, that would be all you need, really. Because now that they've established links with Allik's people, they could probably bring a small bag of those things. And Rashek would never have conceived of ettmetal/harmonium or what it is capable of doing or becoming, he would be dumbfounded. I'm still not entirely sure that Rashek needs to burn metal in his stomach to perform Allomancy, but evidently his metalminds would be Leeched in the ordinary fashion, it would just take longer because of how full they'd be. One more thing: I assume the Leecher needs "a few seconds" to be able to clean out a Compounder's overstuffed metalmind, for a single metal (a la Miles), and Rashek has such metalminds for all the metals. Would it require a chromium savant to target the atiummind specifically? Imagine if he senses the Leeching effect, realizes what must be going on, and taps another, more full metalmind (since his atiummind got drained partway), "shunting" the Leeching effect to that metalmind while he taps other ones to effect his escape and/or immediate retribution. Like a brassmind. For all the planning, he just gets annoyed at feeling chilly for a few seconds for the first time in centuries instead of dying of old age.

So this crossed my mind yesterday, and for some reason I shared it in another thread about Nightblood. What do you think about this angle?

I would love to "see" the expression on Rashek's face when he gets Leeched. An Allomantic power he doesn't know about. Inconceivable! He would probably be able to use his MegaMetalMinds to get away, with F-steel, F-pewter, F-iron, and F-zinc to plan it all out in an eyeblink. (Super speed, combined with extreme weight and lots of instant healing from any physical damage absorbed, is basically to be a Juggernaut). So there would have to be more to it than Leeching him to gain a few seconds' window to most likely unsuccessfully kill him. And, I'm not entirely sure about Rashek having metals to Leech. I more than half suspect his "special, beyond lerasium" strength in Allomancy that stem from his Ascension means he is able to power his Allomancy directly from Preservation all the time, without needing to burn metals to create a conduit. And you wouldn't be able to Leech that. That is purely speculation, though.

No worries about your English, mate, you're doing fine Killing TLR and having Sazed take the power of the Well won't make him Harmony; he needs to take up the full Shard, not just the temporary Ascension granted by the Well, plus destroy Ati as the vessel of Ruin (which only Vin was equipped to do, as a self-sacrifice) and then take that Shard up at the same time (given how they reacted, it's possible he could only combine them with a simultaneous Ascension, as he did). And it was implied at the end of Hero of Ages that Sazed would not have been able to take up Ruin without being, well, ruined by his experience of loss with Tindwyl. Anyway, it's fun enough to discuss a "Wax, Wayne, and Marasi plan to go on an alt-history timeline hopping hunting trip, to bag a Lord Ruler" scenario. I do not think Sazed can catch TLR just with his own steelminds, he won't have enough stored in them versus the amount Rashek would have in his. Maybe with the element of surprise, but the window would be pretty small to operate in, before TLR responded with floor wiping power. Don't forget the awesome Soothing power of the Lord Ruler, too. He all but Soothed Vin into a catatonic state in the throne room when getting her to point out Tevidian as her father. He obviously let up on that afterward, so she could appreciate his monologue. Now imagine him Rioting his opponents' fear of him at the same time. The Era 2 heroes would be particularly unprepared for it, since emotional Allomancy is so regulated in their time, much less dealing with the strength of Rashek's Allomancy. Whatever they come up with to handle him would have to be quick. I think Leeching is the best option, if we only knew how long it would disrupt him tapping his metalminds.

You have to define what the Dream Team's goal is in going back Terminator-style, in pursuit of a saboteur from a shared future they come from. It isn't going to be "we must kill The Lord Ruler and then renew the Well's power", as that would just leave Scadrial in the World of Ash but without a Lord Ruler, and only serve to buy another 1,024 years before Ruin plays his next gambit to manipulate towards his eventual release. The goal would need to be to ensure Harmony's Ascension, by killing the saboteur. They should avoid confronting TLR entirely, or interacting with Kell and his crew. But I get it: you're not doing this as a real what-if exercise (if that phrase even makes any sense), but as a framework for considering an assassination attempt on an unwitting Lord Ruler before he killed Kelsier, if Wax, Wayne, and Marasi were able to cross over from another parallel dimension to aid Kell and his crew (including a trained Vin) towards that goal, armed with info, future technology, weapons, and metals. And without using Vin's mist-fueled power level. And ignoring whatever else would happen next to this Scadrial-Beta timeline, they're here on safari! So let's focus on that. The only way to remove Rashek's bracers was for Vin to draw in the mists, and you've ruled that out as something anybody would be able to do, then TLR has nigh-infinite metalminds in every FE era Feruchemical attribute, plus enough Allomantic strength to Push or Pull on the metals in people's stomachs. The Dream Team won't be able to kill him in a head-to-head confrontation, like a pit fight. My TLDR take would be: The Dream Team still won't be able to kill him in an open, head-to-head confrontation. But Kelsier, Wax, and Wayne could likely plan a clever trap, along the lines of the ideas in the several threads discussing "How To Kill The Lord Ruler", using foreknowledge, the element of surprise, and taking advantage of his initial overconfidence. Aluminum was known and available to TLR, and the special property of not being affected by Allomantic steel or iron would be known to him as well. And the Dream Team would not be able to make or procure more aluminum once in the FE. How many aluminum bullets would they be able to bring back, and how many guns? Those would be useful in bringing down Inquisitors, especially the ones without spikes for F-gold, but even ones with them could be taken down with enough shots, as their goldminds would be limited to what health they stored by "resting" every night. They'd run out. But would they have enough bullets to take down 16-20 Inquisitors? Urk. And I think the idea of going after Inquisitors is a bad one. Even as "practice". If you give TLR any kind of heads up that some crew armed with new technology is coming after him, starting with his most powerful servants, they'd be inviting him to sniff them out and then come to crush them in person with the full weight of his powers. Time bubbles won't mean as much against TLR as you may think, even if he'd be very surprised: Leras had swapped out the temporal metals, cadmium and bendalloy, for atium/malatium. But he could just tap a steelmind at a higher multiplier than Wayne's bendalloy could do. Chromium, now, is another story. Leeching was unknown in the Final Empire. But, it was in fact on the Allomantic Wheel of the time, unlike the temporal metals, and so would likely be known as A Thing to Rashek (alone), just not a metal available with the technology he was willing to allow in his Empire. I wonder what Leeching a Feruchemist tapping a metalmind would do? We haven't seen that, have we? My guess is they'd be interrupted in their tapping, but then could resume tapping after some short period of time? The minus of chromium is that one needs to get close enough to TLR to Leech him in the first place, and that's a dangerous thing to attempt. So, back to the trap idea. Surprise him somehow in a way that lets Kelsier and Vin get close enough to Leech him repeatedly, and hope that makes him temporarily unable to tap his metalminds for more attributes. Then plug him with aluminum bullets from an aluminum gun?

It can't be just "stick an Invested object into the Oathgate mechanism and go", because dead Shardblades didn't work, even though they did flow to fit the lock. And they are still Invested. My instinct agrees with this. Nightblood destroys to smoke even ordinary physical objects, I think the Oathgate would be destroyed. The fact that an Honorblade can operate the Oathgates when a dead spren Blade cannot is interesting. It's probably related to having a "live" link to Honor... Even though Honor is dead? I had a sudden thought the other day that "hey, maybe the Oathgates are the Dawnshards, like they turned them into the Oathgates in a swords-to-plowshares like maneuver or something, and the bit where one of them is different from the others references the Urithiru Central one!" That would fit in with the Oathgates needing some kind of link to Honor to work properly, and Honor foreseeing that him being gone would put the Radiants at risk of having "unchecked" power and some kind of ability to destroy Roshar with the Dawnshards as they had done to Ashyn (the suppressed Dawnshard nature of them would be free to come to the surface). And the Recreance was specifically an action taken by that generation of Knights Radiant with the knowledge that Honor was dying and would be unable to keep a lid on them. But it's complete and wild speculation, a crackpot theory with no support in the material. Yet.

Hmm but Preservation is completely dead before the Well is useable? Not sure how that happens as Ruin is what killed him in Hero of Ages. But you're also saying some agent of Autonomy has gone back in time to subvert TLR into planning to free Ruin by releasing the power at the Well? Does this Subverted Rashek know he's being pursued Terminator-style by Era 2 agents, and similarly educated about what happened in the original timeline? Because nothing would defeat a Prepared and Forewarned Lord Ruler from personally defending Kredik Shaw and its hidden portal to the Well. Vin certainly wouldn't have, he was only defeated because he didn't expect Vin to be able to draw on the mists.

Again, we have not seen Allomancy compounded, in a first person, "this is how it's done" way. At best, that WoB implies that TLR had found a way to do it - not that anybody else had ever figured it out, or might even be capable of it (there's never been another Fullborn). And there were other, later WoBs explaining Rashek's power level in Allomancy as being a direct Spiritweb self-modification only possible via Ascension: Perhaps his Spiritweb twiddling was key to any Compounding of Allomancy, beyond just having both Feruchemy and Allomancy, which mechanics naturally lead to a net-gain from Feruchemical stores. We just don't know.

If Ruin had been freed from the Well and Preservation were truly killed (splintered) with no way for Vin to take up the Shard, nor a ghost Kelsier to hold it temporarily... Then it'd have been Game Over for Scadrial, my friend. They could still keep Ruin from getting the atium stash in the Trustwarren, the vast bulk of what had condensed at the Pits over at least a thousand years, but Ruin would simply destroy everything as he basically had succeeded in doing with the ashmounts, tsunamis, and earthquakes, then do whatever slow process he could do with Inquisitor pawns to sift through the remains looking for it. It'd annoy and frustrate Ruin, but not defeat him.

Except that the resurrection of dead orders, ideals, etc., is basically the underlying theme for a lot of the elements of Stormlight Archives... With the point being that these things, all along, had only been mostly dead. I was only as dead as your oaths. If the idea of a spren reviving through means other than their original Radiant recommitting to their Ideals is eye-rolling instead of intriguing, then I'm sorry' nothing personal, but I wish you much ocular rotation in the next few books!

Haha, I just thought of something else, too: a putative Shard of Cowardice might well grant among the most powerful magic abilities in the Cosmere! Think about it. The most powerful and portable magic systems we've seen so far are end-positive, and come from Preservation (Allomancy) and Endowment (Awakening). This has to do with which Shardic Intents end up having "end-positive" goals. To shore up, to Preserve against entropy, requires constant buttressing on the part of Preservation, which is why Allomancy is end-positive. To Endow means to give away, with a net positive to the recipient. Thus, native Nalthians' one innate Breath means they come "from the factory" with slightly but impactfully more Investiture than a baseline Cosmere human would (I guess the same is true of a Natural Born Allomancer), and the mechanics of the magic system involve accumulating the Investiture into a bigger and bigger ball to do useful things (like the Endowment of some well-known Universities). Honor's magic system is ultimately end-neutral: access to it requires an oath, Surgebinding at the cost of swearing Ideals or an Oathpact, but external fueling with Stormlight. This is different from burning metals for Allomancy, where the "burning" of a metal is opening a Spiritual conduit for accessing a "filtered expression of the power of Preservation", and the metal itself is ordinary, non-Invested metal. With Surgebinding, the Stormlight drawn in is the Investiture that is then pushed through the "filter" of the Surges that the spren bond enables - but on its own, the bond does not grant anything except chit-chat with a sentient idea (at least not until the Third Ideal, which grants access to the innate Investiture of that spren in the physical form of a Blade). Cultivation's "Old Magic" requires a balanced "pruning". To get new growth in direction/capacity X, there must be an equal snipping-off of growth already gained in Y. To the recipient the X/Y balance may not be obvious, but Cultivation's measuring system is unknown, possibly capricious (especially when the deal is determined by a spren trying to learn about humans). Devotion's power of AonDor is ridiculously OP, but highly location-specific ("only works well in or close to the city of Elantris!"), thanks to Odium having crammed most of the Shardic power into the Cognitive Realm around Sel. That seems to imply that without that CR-based limitation, with a living Shard of Devotion, one with AonDor would be able to draw Aons at will, anywhere, any time, as long as she liked you enough (what the Shaod now represents, with an unknown selection mechanism functioning on autopilot). Now THAT'S Devotion for ya! Well, what kind of magic system would happen due to a Shardic Intent of "do whatever you want, just leave me alone/alive?" Maybe the power would be inversely proportional to the fear or risk involved, and the accessing of the power would be tied to a "security object" like Linus' blanket from "Peanuts".

Here's another thing to consider: I just remembered another WoB about as-yet-unknown Shards: one of them "just wants to hide and survive". Perhaps this is the one you've put into either the "Vengeance" or the "Pragmatism" bucket: Ordered Goals / chaotic methods, and either concerned with the "how you should think about it" or "how you should do it". Like maybe instead of "Vengeance", the "goal" is not "balance" but "survival (by any means necessary)", and the "how to think about it" is "Oh no oh no, I really don't wanna die". The Shard of Survival, of Self-Preservation. Who does not lilke the name Cowardice, though s/he would admit if confronted with it, "it has a certain bite."

Maybe that would work. But we don't know, do we? That's what puzzled me about "we know of two" (examples of so-called "A-compounding") when by my count, we know of zero so far in canonically published works. If there was a recent WoB or something, I would like to know about it.

I'm rather confused by this entire discussion. What is "A-compounding"? As I understood it, Compounding in the Metallic Arts refers to burning a Feruchemical metalmind with Allomancy for the same metal, resulting in the net-positive-gain mechanics of Allomancy combining with the attribute stored in the metalmind for a higher return (10x, I think it is) of the attribute than was stored. In other words, Compounding only ever gets you the Feruchemical attribute, not the Allomantic effect of burning the metal, at least not with a multiplier effect. Yet you seem to be talking about "Compounding" a Steelpush or duralumin boost. What is this referring to? The only times I can remember an Allomancer pushing/pulling "with ridiculous power" on metals inside another person's body are: Rashek vs. Vin/Marsh in the throne room, where he's simply the Most Powerful Allomancer Ever (beyond lerasium level) due to his Ascension and self-modification Vin, also in the throne room and then her Kredik Shaw Inquiistor Beatdown, when drawing on the mists (the power of Preservation itself) Marasi, wielding the Bands of Mourning to escape the Set (which contains as-yet-unexplained mist-generating-level strength of Allomancy) Your later quote referencing a WoB about increasing one's Allomantic ability with hemalurgy for the same ability is NOT Compounding, but simply "stacking" - the way that Vin was able to pierce copperclouds when wearing the earring that was actually a spike for F-bronze her mother created by murdering her baby sister, who had been a Seeker. That's like a doubling effect at best, depending on the strength of the source Allomancer, minus some hemalurgic loss. It would not result in a recursively applicable "nigh infinite" Allomantic power. Is that what you're referring to? In which case, spiking an Augur with an additional spike for A-gold to intensify the horrible experience does sound pretty funny.

Very impressive! I think you must be broadly on the right path, that like the table of Allomancy, there four quadrants and four "dimensions" driving the definition/division of the sixteen Shards. What little guidance we have on this is that Brandon has said that not all Shards have an "diametric opposite" pairing like Preservation and Ruin did, and that if he were given the choice, he'd most like to take up "Ingenuity", a Shard we have not yet seen. Though on your chart, that could simply be another name or aspect of "Crafting". I would adjust or rename Vengeance, Pragmatism, and Dreams. Vengeance, per your terminology, represents ordered goals/chaotic methods, plus primary concern for "how you should do it" (in execution); Pragmatism, on the other hand, is ordered goals/chaotic methods, concerned with "how you should think (about) it". But it seems to me they should be reversed, then? Wouldn't "Pragmatism" be about the doing not the thinking (motivating), while Vengeance would be all about the motivation? Also, "Vengeance" generally implies a reaction to something preceding it as a reaction, which would seem to be strange as a Shardic Intent. Nobody seeks vengeance "out of the box", one must first be wronged to be consumed by the need to set it right. And "Dreams" or "Dreaming" doesn't feel to me like the right way to capture something with "ordered methods". That said, I can't immediately think of any better terms/names to slot into there.

I'm looking forward to receiving my hardbound copy on Thursday, according to Amazon. Does that count? I'm sure a lot of people who pre-ordered the hardcopy version of a graphic novel (which would probably be a lot of people interested in it in the first place) would be in a similar category not "not being willing to pay double to read it electronically a few weeks earlier". Would I double-pay for a prose version of the same canonical material (not the "unreleased" prose version), maybe... But from experience, unlike text/prose works, reading comics/graphic novels on my tablet device, much less my smartphone, is just a terrible experience compared to the Real Thing.

Harmony is, appropriately enough, an Alloy of Gods.

This is great. I forgot about the sound barrier. Mach 1 on Earth is about 767 mph, not sure what it would be in Roshar where the air density is different (for one, they have a considerably higher oxygen content than we do). I also didn't know that real-life human skydivers have broken Mach 1. Wow. So basically, "level ground to the horizon" Lift could easily achieve the speed of sound, if not sustain a speed much above it, with a Lashing, and with multiple Lashings, reach Mach 1 in well under 60 seconds. Yeeeeeeha.